Program

The Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous was written in 1938 and
published in early 1939. This was a little over 3 years after AA
itself began. The terminology in it, including the Twelve Steps,
contained a lot of the typical Oxford Group and Protestant concepts
common at the time.

Jim B(urwell), the “self-proclaimed athiest” of the early group,
after several heated debates, reached some compromises with Bill
and the others, including the phrase, “God, as we understood Him.”

Throughout the Big Book and other AA literature, there are a lot of
the use of “God”, “Higher Power”, and “He/Him” to describe God.
This can be quite a stumbling block for athiests, agnostics, or even
those who simply have a bad experience with organized religion. The
claim that AA is spiritual and not religious is hard to buy
for many people. Even the use of “He” and “Him” can be irritating
to people who do believe in a god.

“In AA’s first years I all but ruined the whole undertaking with this
sort of unconscious arrogance. God as I understood Him had to be for
everybody. Sometimes my aggression was subtle and sometimes it was crude.
But either way it was damaging -- perhaps fatally so -- to numbers of
non-believers.”

Alternative Twelve Steps

You can find many examples where people have re-written the
Twelve Steps in various ways. You may find these helpful. But if you
are going to regular Twelve Step meetings, you will hear the original
version, probably exclusively, modified only to reflect the particular
addiction.

Program

We have used the term Program in this manual as a kind of
shorthand to indicate a secular spiritual form of guidance — what
theists would probably call God, and which was what some meant by the
term “Higher Power”. Here is why we chose to use it.

Autopilot

One of the authors used to be a Certified Instrument Flight Instructor.
When you are piloting an aircraft under instrument conditions, things
can get very busy. You are holding a heading and an altitude, checking
to make sure you are still following a prescribed flight path, talking
with Air Traffic Control, juggling maps, approach charts, other radio
frequencies, monitoring fuel conditions, possible icing, and many other
factors. And all this may be done with a good bit of turbulence. Pilots
have to train to do this without an electronic autopilot control,
but we can say that being able to switch on the autopilot makes things
tremendously easier.

Recovery feels similar. Things get rough, and the Physical, Emotional,
and Mental processes of the disease start getting loud. Going on
autopilot can be an analogy for making contact with a sponsor or others
in the program, reading some literature, meditating, or getting in
contact with that still, small voice within that can give you
the guidance that the addiction tries to deny you. You could call this
autopilot your Program.

Cruise Control

You may be more familiar with the cruise control in a car. Imagine
being on a highway while there is some kind of crisis going on,
maybe with the kids or whatever. It would be much easier if you
could switch on the cruise control, and you would at least not have
to worry about the speed, traffic and road conditions permitting.
The Program can give you guidance similar to that which the cruise
control gives the car.

Self-driving Cars

We will soon start seeing an option for cars that drive themselves,
safer than humans can drive them. Then it will be even easier to
think of responding to a crisis, like an emergency phone call, or
the kids fighting. We might not call that a Higher Power, but it
gives us an idea of how that guidance would make things much easier.

So, if it helps, think of or use the term Program when you
see “God” or “Higher Power”. Or substitute another term if you
like. There are lots of recovering addicts who have a spiritual
program that does not involve a deity.